Marion Hayes Cain recalls her debut in the 1925 Mountain Play
by Laurie Thompson
It’s that time of year again; Mountain Play season in Marin!
We invite you to explore the first six decades of the Mountain Play on Mt. Tamalpais on our digital archive.
The Mountain Play archive was donated to the California Room by former Mountain Play Association President Marion Hayes Cain. In her 1975 oral history interview Cain recounts how she first became involved in the organization:
In [my] teen years we always got together groups of our young friends and we rode the ferryboats over [from San Francisco] playing ukuleles. We all sat on the deck of the boat…and [then] we’d hike the mountain. We’d walk down from the old station and start up the stairs and the pipeline to the Mountain Home and then hit the trails. And sometimes, after the play, we’d run all the way back…. To see who could get there [first]….But it was not until 1925 that I became actively involved. I was then in college. I was studying dance and drama and… a dance teacher whom I admired very much, Virginia Whitehead, was in Garnet Holme’s cast this year. They were going to play his original pageant of the history of Drake arriving here from England. And Garnet had a very informal way of working with his actors so he asked some of them to bring some new talent. They were looking for an ingénue and so Virgina had invited me to come to the rehearsal and that was the day I began my great friendship with Garnet Holme because he said “[we’ll] take her.
I remember that we rehearsed the play in the Columbia Park Boys’ Club…. It was out [on] Church and Dolores Streets [in San Francisco] somewhere…. And Guy Kibbe, who later became quite active in motion pictures played Drake…. Virginia Whitehead played Queen Elizabeth…. And the part I played was a Plymouth lass who was in love with the mapmaker of the trip….
Marion went on to recount that Holme’s original script for Drake was lost and so 1925 was the only time that play was ever performed.
You can read Marion Hayes Cain’s complete oral history here.
Originally published at https://annetkent.kontribune.com.
